Inception

Gasp! I love this movie! I know. I know. Everyone loves this movie. But like c'mon. It was bad ass. Plus I'm a sucker for over the top movies. And Leo. (swoon) Plus this one was trippy and pretended to have some substance. It looked great on blu ray. My first blu ray purchase. I kinda felt like it was a big deal. I want to watch it with some surround sound though because this movie definitely gets better when its louder. I dunno. I don't think there is much to say about this movie. I think you have all seen it. I think you all know it's about dreams. I think half of you are probably confused by it. I think you don't know that I'm watching wrestling while I type this. Nuff said.

Kiss the Girls

Book 2 of the Alex Cross series! How utterly predictable. Lame. This one is a book turned movie so you may have heard of it. (Morgan Freeman plays Alex Cross) A mysterious man is kidnapping women at college campuses in the South. He takes only the most beautiful accomplished women. They are all extraordinary. He calls himself Casanova and he keeps the women in a harem. He does with them what he pleases, but he wants them to love them. He furnishes their room with objects they would like to win them over. Unfortunately Alex Cross's niece was one of the women kidnapped. This shit just got personal. So you know, he does normal cop / psychologist stuff to find her. He also falls in love with one of the victims that escaped along the way. Typical. I won't ruin the end for you because it's a movie on tv sometime, and I highly suggest you watch it! The book is even better. So read that too!

The Blind Side

For some reason I feel like I blogged this already. Apparently I didn't.

So, this is the story of Michael Oher. An illiterate large teenage with no family that has no idea how to play football. Sandra Bullock is pretty much a ball buster. She is a tough chick with a heart of gold. She takes Oher in and they become family. They tell him "Play football kid! You're big!" But Michael just doesn't get it. He doesn't want to hurt people because he's actually a big baby.

Sidebar: Have you seen Friday Night Lights? Have you seen when Riggins bangs an older woman with a son? Do you know the son? Yea, well he is essentially (and may actually be) Sandra Bullock's son. "Tim Riggins! Oh boy!"

Anyways, Michael Oher must defend his quarterback like hs is Tim Riggins' bud so he starts demolishing people in football. Then he goes to college. There is some drama, but ultimately all is resolved.

I liked this movie. Sandra Bullock is really good in it.

Guess who didn't like this movie?

Michael Oher. Apparently he could read. Apparently he could play football. Oops.

Along Came a Spider

So, I have to apologize. I've been a bad bad back blogged member. I have not posted since the beginning of January because I'm awful! I had a few things to post in January but I got so caught up with the big move, that I forgot. Then I just neglected it because, well, I'm awful!

Ok. James Patterson. Murder mystery writer. (Side note! He also writes Maximum Ride. Yea I'm talking to you Sweeney) He comes out with a book probably once or twice a year. Some of his best books are from his Alex Cross series. It's a bunch of different murder mysteries following this one DC cop, Alex Cross. He's a widower with two children who lives with his nana. He's a pretty likeable character. He also has this best friend Sampson who sounds like a ton of fun.

I have read various Alex Cross books and decided I wanted to read them all in order. This is the first Cross novel. It follows him as he searches for a killer who kidnapped two famous children. The killers name is Gary Soneji, one I recognized from many of his books. Soneji eludes Cross for the majority of the book but then is caught which is very out of character. He plays the psycho card and plays it well, but he eventually sentenced to jail time. To Cross' dismay, in the last chapter of the book, he finds out Soneji escapes from prison. Soneji makes a visit to Cross' house at night and almost kidnaps his children. Gasp! I feel like the relationship between these two will span multiple books!

Oh PS. I liked this book.

Super Mario Bros.

What is there to say about a game that is the icon of the whole culture? Only one thing. Unbeatable.

Oh I killed Bower. It took me three months and endless ridicule from people, but Bowers died in a fire pit of hell. I mean unbeatable in the fact that no game, in no genre, on no platform, has ever came close to me to the perfect video game like Super Mario Bros.

I did have a lot of trouble with this game. It could be contributed to a lot of facts: I like save points. I like turtles. And I fear falling to my death. But the real reason the game took longer than it should was confidence. Confidence in your jumps is the main thing that will help you conquer the game. From a single hop to conquering a Hammer Bros., you need to be 100% sure that you're going to make the right decision, because a moment's hesitation will throw you off the game's internal pattern (an invention of the creator and composer.)

All I can say is that Super Mario Bros. is the only game that gave me a full enjoyment no matter what happened to Mario or his brother. Live, die or win, Super Mario Bros. entertains with no fail.

An Object of Beauty

Books by the writer/singer/comedian Steve Martin are usually not what you expect, if you expect antics of The Jerk or SNL. His books are usually smartly written, with enjoyable characters and witty to a fault. AOoB, not so much.

Lacey Yeager is a head strong, beautiful young woman who bursts on the art scene of the early 90's. This is the protagonist. Unfortunate circumstances. This is the antagonist. Daniel Franks is an old friend and one time lover of Lacey. This is your narrator. The rest of the book can really only be deciphered if the reader has had at least one Art History class of the Great Masters. It is a simple and sometimes fun romp through the art world, especially critiques and personal opinions on art, the art scene and artists themselves. The story and protagonist reminding me of a dying sun. Bright and shining for the first two parts, but as we enter part three, it fades and leaves you with nothing but empty coldness.

The book cover is pretty amazing though.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

I'm a big fan of the Tomb Raider series, and I'm also a big fan of developer Naughty Dog (they made the Crash Bandicoot series). So when Naughty Dog attempted a Tomb Raider-style game, I knew that when I got a PS3 that Uncharted would be one of the first games I'd pick up. Also, its sequel from 2009 basically won every game-of-the-year award there is, so obviously the first game has to be at least pretty fun. Unfortunately, having finished Uncharted, I can say that I'm not really that impressed. The platforming was at times decent, but mostly pretty bland. The puzzles were usually pretty simple and never had that grand sense of scale that I got from, say, Tomb Raider: Underworld. What sets Uncharted apart from that series is its heavier focus on shooting, which I just didn't enjoy at all. It was pretty difficult to aim, and moving around with a gun was slow and a pain in the ass. People criticize Tomb Raider for its gunplay, but I'll take the hands-off but much less frustrating shooting over what Uncharted had to offer any day. I know it seems like I'm ripping on Uncharted, but it was in fact a very good game- the problem here was just that I felt like recent Tomb Raider games were better in nearly every way. Oh well. I hear that basically everything's fixed in Uncharted 2, so of course I'll give that a play at some point, but probably not for a while.

Friday Night Lights: Season 4

Oh crap. I finished watching this at least a week ago, wasn't paying that much attention for a few episodes, and also saw 2 more seasons of Friday Night Lights earlier this month. All that adds up to the fact that I don't have much to post here. Which is a shame, because many parts of this season stood out as being really, really good. First off, there's a huge change of setting- instead of coaching the perennial state title contenders the Dillon Panthers, Coach Taylor is now in charge of the newly reformed East Dillon Lions. The team's much worse than before, and the goal is now to just become less of an embarrassment. With most of the original cast members off of the team, we get a few new characters playing the games, the most prominent being troubled QB Vince Howard and classic good-guy Luke Cafferty. They were good characters! Vince throughout the season is dealing with the fact that his friends want him to go back to a life of crime and quit football. Luke deals with the fact that his family has no interest in football and wants him to constantly work on their farm. And late in the season, he's part of a major plot point- he gets fellow newcomer Becky pregnant! The episode centered on Becky's decision over whether to keep the baby or not was definitely one of the high points for me- I found the scenes with she and Mrs. Taylor discussing what to do especially good. But the best part of the season is hands-down the Saracen-centered episode "The Son," focusing on his strained relationship with his father. Overall, I found the season just as good as all the others, probably second to only season 1. And soon enough I'll catch season 5- be it on DVD or airing on NBC. Will it get logged? Wait and find out!

Um Jammer Lammy

I played PaRappa the Rapper and PaRappa the Rapper 2 almost a decade ago and loved both of them a great deal. But somehow, I wasn't even aware of this spin-off in which you wield a guitar instead of a microphone until a couple of months ago when Sweeney brought it to my attention. Thanks, Sween! And when I went to Amazon.com just to see if I could even find a copy, I was delighted to find that new copies were selling for a buck-fifty. What an easy and obvious purchase, right? Unfortunately, for one reason or another, this game was an absolute pain in the ass to play and to beat, and simply wasn't very enjoyable whatsoever. Dammit, Sween! I popped it into my PS3 after getting home from work and immediately set it to "easy" mode. Hey, don't judge me - I wanted to enjoy the songs without running the risk of failing and having to restart any levels, which is something I wasn't intending on doing anyway. Boy, was I mistaken. I could not beat the first level. This is a rhythm-based game, much like Guitar Hero and DDR and the like, and everything hinges on pressing the right buttons at the right times. But even though I was pressing the right buttons at what looked to be the right times (based on an ineffective bar sprinkled with button icons), I wasn't actually hearing my notes being played at the right times. There was a very distinct delay between when I'd push the buttons and when I'd hear the notes being played. And I failed early and often. Frustrated, I went back to the options to seek out some kind of calibration setting or maybe find a tutorial. No such luck. But what I did find was the difficulty setting - not on "easy," but on "normal." What the hell? I changed it back to easy - again - and then went straight to a button that said "start game" instead of exiting the settings and starting the game from the main menu. Why that mattered, I'll never know, but apparently it did, because when I resumed play I was very clearly in "easy" mode. Now, I figured that the easier setting would keep the same fundamental gameplay while just being more forgiving on the timing aspect of the game. Again, how mistaken I was! Easy mode just straight up did away with the need to press the appropriate buttons, but still wanted me to press buttons with impeccable timing. So the game was barely any easier to play, and slightly less fun if anything. But I guess it was easier enough, because I flew through the entire game - six or seven levels, each only two or three minutes long - in under half an hour, failing only once or twice. But the experience amounted to me just wailing away on the X-button with a half-frustrated and half-apathetic candor. The songs weren't memorable, the characters weren't endearing, and the whole thing just felt lame in every area where PaRappa the Rapper felt cool and enjoyable. And have you ever tried to play a 32-bit video game on a 55-inch HD TV? Because let me tell you, it looks like shit. Actually, the TV itself may have been what was causing my timing mishaps, in hindsight. After all, modern rhythm games like Rock Band allow you to calibrate your game to your HD TV, and even though the difference is often no more than a few dozen milliseconds, it's substantial enough to make or break your gameplay. Since I was playing on an HD TV, there's no reason to assume it didn't have the same delay it would have had on a Rock Band game, but since Um Jammer came out way before HD TVs, there'd be no reason for the game to have a calibration setting, rendering me simply unable to play it with proper cadence and timing. Gyah! Oh well. I guess this is what happens when you try to play 12-year-old games with modern-day technology. Whatever. This game may have only taken me an hour or so to beat, but it was, as I'm sure you can tell, an hour riddled with frustration and disappointment. Now let's see if I can salvage this young Friday night.

The Sopranos: Season 1

I watched eight volumes of Seinfeld DVDs between last February and last June. And I'm about to follow the same pattern for another much-acclaimed classic TV show, The Sopranos. Going in, I worried that hype would do the same bad things for this show that it did for the first season of The Wire for me. But that just wasn't the case as I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of this iconic HBO series and found it extremely watchable. That doesn't say much about The Wire, but I've griped about that show before and probably will again. For now, let's focus on The Sopranos - but not too much, obviously, as I'll have another six future posts about the remaining seasons. Tony Soprano is a capo (middle management, if you will) in the Italian-American Mafia. But he's also a father, husband, and son. A big dynamic in this first season is the balance Tony must maintain between his home life and his working life. They often intersect, of course, as Tony's uncle is the mob boss and his children view Tony's associates as their own uncles. One thing I noticed as the season unfolded was that I began to like Tony more and more. At first, Tony was often a cruel and heartless mobster, as well as an unfaithful husband, and I had to ask, "why are we rooting for this guy again?" But as some story arcs took shape and Tony began to run into serious trouble, it was easy to do so. Perhaps he's just a charismatic guy in spite of his blatant immoral lifestyle. Regardless, Tony is certainly one of the most interesting characters I've seen on television, and if he continues to develop and grow throughout the next few seasons (which I fully expect him to do) then I'd absolutely put him up there with Don Draper and Walter White. And speaking of Don Draper, I think it's noteworthy that Mad Men show runner Matthew Weiner served as a writer and executive producer for The Sopranos, as did Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter; some of today's best TV has a shared lineage rooted in The Sopranos. It's kind of like the coaching tree spawned by Bill Belichick's early '00s Patriots dynasty except that the Browns, Broncos, pre-Ryan Jets, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish have all completely sucked. Anyway, I enjoyed this first season a lot and expect the rest of the series to be just as potable. I'll be watching them sporadically, I'm sure, but that rough February-June Seinfeld timeline seems like a good model for the way this series unfolds.